Benjamin Paassen

Junior Professor for Knowledge Representation and Machine Learning at Bielefeld University; affiliate at DFKI EdTec Lab; co-host of "Autonomie und Algorithmen" podcast; researches machine learning for education; supporter of queer feminism 🏳️‍🌈; preferred pronouns: they/them; role model: Sailor Mercury; views are my own

Location: Bielefeld
Languages: German, English
Preferred Pronouns: they/them
Homepage: https://bpaassen.gitlab.io/

Last Notes

2026-03-05 10:59:31 CET

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I agree with that. One sometimes also can hear/read/see how scientists try to make the role they are currently taking more explicit - but it is still imperfect, I feel, and lines can be blurry.

2026-03-05 10:53:24 CET

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For myself, I find it at least somewhat helpful to think of science as informing us about the consequences (including uncertainty estimates, ranges, etc.) of political decisions but politics has to make the decision itself. In that sense, science is "apolitical" or "neutral". But a lot of political actors try to occlude/mislead about the consequences of their political program. And in such cases, I think, science has to take a clear stance in opposition.

2025-08-12 17:09:16 CEST

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But there are also plenty of criticisms. Empirically, we know that LLMs are biased (in different ways than humans), their answers vary much less compared to human answers, and they make mistakes that humans wouldn't make. (5/12)

2025-08-12 17:09:11 CEST

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Some papers claim that. Dillion et al. (2023) let LLMs respond to morality questions and they did indeed respond like average humans. Binz et al. (2025) fine-tuned an LLM to respond like humans to psych questions. (4/12)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2023.04.008
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09215-4

2025-08-12 17:08:14 CEST

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LLMs as participants can only work if LLMs really respond like humans to psychological questions. Do they? (3/12)

2025-08-12 17:08:10 CEST

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Our starting point is a trend in psychology: Recruiting human participants for psychological studies is a lot of effort and expensive. Wouldn't it be great if we could just use LLMs as participants, instead? N = 1000 for just a few dollars. (2/12)

2025-08-12 17:08:06 CEST

Large Language models (LLMs) do not simulate human psychology. That's the title of our new paper, available as preprint today (1/12):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06950